AM News: 16 Percent Of Teachers Account For Third Of All Absences

Alarming Number Of Urban Teachers Are 'Chronically Absent' Huffington Post: The National Council on Teacher Quality classifies 16 percent of teachers in those cities as "chronically absent," meaning they missed 18 or more days per school year. Together, chronically absent teachers accounted for one-third of all teacher absences.

SEC Charges Chicago Charter School Operator With Defrauding Bond Investors BuzzFeed: The SEC is charging the charter operator, UNO, with defrauding investors in a $37.5 million bond offering. UNO, which is run by the Latino nonprofit the United Neighborhood Organization, failed to disclose that it had paid $11 million to a company owned by the brother of its chief operating officer, and misled investors about how the breach of conflict of interest policies might affect their ability to repay the bond.

In Kentucky, Moving Beyond Dependence On Tests NPR: I've driven the 37 miles from Lexington to see one of the most closely watched efforts in the country to change the way schools assess student learning. Principal Amy Swann and the district's superintendent, Carmen Coleman, have completely overhauled their school's educational philosophy, moving away from standardized tests toward an approach called performance-based assessment.

National education organizations urge FCC to increase E-Rate funding PBS: Nineteen national education and library organizations from the Education and Library Networks Coalition representing 14,000 public school districts, 100,000 public schools, 31,000 private schools and more than 16,400 public libraries collaborated on a letter urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to continue the support and strengthening of the E-Rate.

The Documentary That Asks, Is College Worth It? Seattle Public Radio: Ross Reynolds speaks with Andrew Rossi, director of a new documentary "Ivory Tower" that asks the question, is a college education worth the skyrocketing cost of tuition?

The people behind today’s educational software Hechinger Report (Whitmire/Rocketship): On Ben Slivka’s LinkedIn page you see a swarm of startups, the fruit of his labors as a talented software writer, all of it rooted in his training at Northwestern University as a mathematician and computer scientist.

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In spite of the claim that "The Common Core Curriculum Void" "isn't about the standards", it should be. If you're going to spend the billions that are being spent on this and are going to still end up with your kids in a competitive position grossly inferior to that of their peers overseas when they show up on American shores ready to take American college entrance tests to gain seats in the leading American universities that are going global in their approach to college admissions, why wouldn't you stop now, read and compare the relevant standards, understand how Achieve has played a central role in misleading the American people with its claim that its math standards are internationally competitive (its publication compares American and Singaporean secondary mathematics without revealing that "secondary school" ends in 10th grade in Singapore but in 12th grade in the United States), and stop proceeding like sheep to the slaughter of your own children's competitive futures?